Registration working, authentication not work

Hello,
I'm new to laravel and I've been following the "Laravel 5 Fundementals" videos hoping to learn how to work with laravel. I made it to episode 15 but now I'm running into a problem. I can confirm that if I use /auth/registration I can sign up new users successfully as they show up in my database with all the fields that were filled in successfully inserted. However trying to sign in a user doesn't seem to work.

I've set the AuthController (App\Http\Controllers\Auth\AuthController) to redirect to my homepage (/) and set some custom validation rules to reflect stricter rules / reflect new fields I added.

And I have not modified any class it inherits from. Could someone please tell me how to further debug this, from what I've understood from the tutorial video if I get redirected I should have a successful login, otherwise I would have been redirected to the form itself. I seem to have the awkward situation where I'm not logged in successfully but I am redirected.
Doing a var_dump($errors) in my root view isn't giving me any insight either.